The company fired its former chief security officer Joe Sullivan and informed customers as soon as it concluded its investigation, but the fact that Uber had known for some time before going public is worrisome for customers, investors and regulators.

US Senate Republicans have since asked Uber for information about the consequences of the data breach. The Senators wrote to Uber’s executives that the fact that “the company concealed the breach without notifying affected drivers and consumers...makes this a serious incident that merits further scrutiny.” The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and the Senate Finance Committee will be conducting a probe to learn what steps Uber took and has since taken to investigate what occurred and improve the integrity of its systems.

The New York State Attorney General and officials in Connecticut, Illinois, and Massachusetts confirmed they will be opening an investigation into the incident. And several nations including Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines have said they are investigating Uber’s withholding of information about the hack. The Securities and Exchange Commission may also probe Uber if the break-in is material to Uber’s valuation and misled investors as a result.

An Uber spokesman told CNET, “We’ve been in touch with several state Attorney General offices and the FTC to discuss the issue, and we stand ready to cooperate with them going forward.” According to CNET, Uber has acknowledged that hackers accessed names and email addresses, as well as the driver’s license numbers of 600,000 Uber drivers, by stealing the password to a cloud database hosted by Amazon Web Services. Uber is providing the 7 million drivers affected with free identity theft monitoring, but they may have been a year too late for many, which could lead to a flood of class-action lawsuits.

Uber Reveals Hack That Affected 57 Million Accounts, One Year After Incident was last modified: December 8th, 2017 by Margaret Marie